This page focuses on the poetry, but you should prepare yourself for a range of genres, including fiction (Birdsong/Regeneration, non-fiction Testament of Youth/the journalism we have looked at and drama (useful extracts in the OCR book and in the AQA A2 book, section 6.)

In August 1914, Maurice Hewlett in For Two Voices foresaw the two views of war that would conflict during the realities of warfare:

O this war, what a glorious game!
Sin and shame, sin and shame

These views had in fact been in evidence in the Boer War around the turn of the century. Thomas Hardy, in Drummer Hodge, described the brutal reality of disposal of corpses:

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined, just as found.

In contrast, B.Paul Newman wrote:

But Duty spurred us to the foremost place
And Honour beckoned with a shining face.

Henry Newbolt had in Vitai Lampada compared war to a team sport, each inspiring the refrain Play up! Play up and play the game.

In the early days of the war which, it was widely believed, would be over by Christmas (1914), some poetry encouraged recruitment. An example would be Fall Inby Harold Begbie, August 1914, in a poem published in the Daily Chronicle:
..what will you lack when your mate goes by
With a girl who cuts you dead?

This line of persuasion was much used in the poster recruitment campaigns.

Jesse Pope's poems were published in the daily press (The Mail). In Who's for the Game?she wrote:

Your country is up to her neck in a fight
And she's looking and calling for you...
Who would much rather come back with a crutch
Than lie low and be out of the fun
Sassoon in France wrote of victory and delight , while Owen wrote in his Ballad of Love and War:

Oh meet it is and passing sweet
To live at peace with others
But sweeter still and far more meet
To die in war for brothers.

Contrast this sentiment with his later Dulce et Decorum Est, where the same words acquire a critical and sarcastic force.

Soldier poets such as Rupert Brooke gained currency (in Brooke's case especially after his death.) Notions of honour and glory in dying for your country were expressed in 'epic' lexis reminiscent of Arthurian legend - words such as 'warrior' and 'foe'. Herbert Asquith wrote in The Volunteer:
From twilight to the halls of dawn he went
His lance is broken; but he lies content

John McRae's In Flanders Fields is well known:

Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.

Lawrence Binyon's For the Fallen is also well known:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

As the war continued beyond Christmas and through 1915, poets increasingly wrote about the truth of war. Gilbert Frankau in his poem The Other Sidegives an answer to the 'heroic' accounts of the conflict:

But what's the good of war-books, if they fail
To give civilian readers an idea
Of what life islike in the firing line.........

He dismisses the other accounts as 'Boy's Own Paper - balderdash!

Robert Graves in his 1916 A Dead Boche wrote 'War's hell' and 'A certain cure for lust of blood.'

To this list may be added poems such as Owen's Exposure which we have looked at in class. E.Garnett turned to satire in Papa's War :

What a wonderful time the Creatures of Blood were having all over Europe The socialist W.N. Ewer's Five Souls ends each stanza with the sarcastic:

Igave my life for freedom - this I know
For those who bade me fight had told me so

E.A. Mackintosh in Recruiting bitingly commented:
Fat civilians wishing they could go and fight the Hun
Can't you see them thanking God
That they're over 41.


Some believers questioned the effects of the war from a Christian point of view. Harold Begbie's beliefs caused him to change his mind about the war and he wrote in War Exalts:

By War the brave are tested, and cowards are disgraced!
Show God His own image shrapnel'd into paste.

Rudyard Kipling memorably wrote in Common Form:

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

After the armistice on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the combattants returned to Lloyd George's 'country for heroes to live in..' Except for the dead; May Cannon wrote in The Armistice:

And he's my man, and I want him, she said,
And knew that peace could not give back her dead.

Some who survived found it hard to adjust to civilian life (cp. Kabuo and Carl in Snow Falling on Cedars). R.Aldington wrote in his Meditation
I am too restless
For the old life...
Too sick at heart with overmuch slaughter
To dream quietly over books.


Clifford Dyment wrote in The Son:

.....I thought of him
My father killed, and all the other men.

Joseph Leftwich had written ominously in 1915:

And if we win,
And crush the Huns,
In twenty years
We must fight their sons.....

Most of the examples above are from War Poems, an excellent anthology with interpretation and analysis; it is by Christopher Martin, ISBN 0 00 322238-1. Highly recommended.

In the 60s, the anti-Vietnam war movement 'appropriated' the realistic work of Sassoon, Owen and others for its cause. This very attention regenerated interest in the period. My own favourite example of this is Chris White's Butcher's Tale (Western Front 1914) on the classic 1967 album Odessey [sic] and Oracle by The Zombies:

And I have seen a friend of mine
Hang on the wire
Like some rag toy
Then in the heat the flies come down
And cover up the boy
And the flies come down in
Gommecourt, Thiepval
Mamets Wood and French Verdun
If the preacher he could see those flies
Wouldn't preach for the sound of guns.


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